Video production: Andrew Kennedy Lewis
Online learning has become common in corporate training. How does user experience, or UX, come into play within L&D? Andy Vitale, UX design director at SunTrust Bank and Samantha Zarrini, senior product manager at General Electric share their thoughts on the importance of user experience in learning.
Read the full transcript of Vitale’s and Zarrini’s interview below:
Vitale: User experience is the marriage of understanding user goals and business goals.
Zarrini: I like to think about user experience as the emotions, attitudes, feelings and interaction that people have with a product, a service or a company. User experience exists in pretty much everything that we do every day. It could be your experience getting a cup of coffee to your experience on a website. When we think about learning, we try to focus on the learner because we are in an ever-changing fast-paced digital world and people are learning in different types of ways than they used to learn.
Vitale: User experience when applied to learners is about understanding their needs, sometimes unarticulated, and helping provide solutions for them so they can achieve their desired results.
Zarrini: The focus then becomes on learner-centered design and what are the experiences that our learners have currently today and what do we want those experiences to be tomorrow? We need to understand a little bit more about how our learners like to learn, what their hopes and dreams are, what their expectations are for learning and what their pain points are with the process as it stands today. Based on that, we take some UX methodologies and begin to overlay them. So, we start to build out things like personas – what are the living breathing use-cases of our audience, in your organization or for your specific product? Based on that, build and test and iterate with that persona in mind.
